Our small non profit has one of these units, we deleted the OS partition (but not the recovery partition) and installed Windows 7. What I've noticed is if you use a Hiren boot CD, the first option you get it to boot from hard drive, evidently (and this is not just gateway) the Hiren boot cd when you tell it to boot off the hard drive will launch the recovery partition (perhaps because the recovery partition is in the first logical order) so in the case you need to do an OS recovery you download and burn this disk, boot it from cd, select the first option, then the recovery partition will launch.

I did this by accident and found it was going to try to restore Vista over the working Windows 7 partition. Fortunately I was able to cancel the system restore. So this answers your comments about not being able to choose to boot to the recovery partition when you've reloaded the OS partition without using Gateway's internal hard drive recovery methods and lose the ability to select the partition by keystroke at power up.

11-26-2009 03:04 PM

ganenge

t-68256 note book

tis is not a very good comuter it has many compatiblity issues and deficult to update. this is strickly a cheap gameing computer and i wish i had not bought it. I even have issues with simply things like microsoft word where it will freze up and lose all the information and canot run older games behind microsoft Me. my old 2000 is in much better condision despite misseing a cd drive and no side pannel. this is deffnetly not a computer you sould buy.

03-30-2009 02:56 AM

Rob Williams

That's the big problem with notebooks, and one I experience with almost any notebook. Gaming on a desktop spoils things for you when you go on the notebook and can't crank the settings, haha.

Glad you enjoy the notebook though!

03-28-2009 02:56 PM

Unregistered

Nice comp

I have this, I just want it to run games better, other than that, its preety good

09-27-2008 10:55 PM

Unregistered

Nice review. I bought this laptop for my son from BestBuy in August when it was on sale, and upgraded it to Vista Ultimate. Nice machine. Agree with you about the recovery discs.

Last week the hard drive failed. Gateway support quickly agreed to ship a new one to me. The drive that failed is a WD. Don't blame Gateway for that, I suppose.

09-14-2008 10:59 PM

Rob Williams

Gateway T-6836 14.1" Notebook

Notebooks are more popular than ever, and the vast selection is incredible. There's a notebook for everyone, and in the case of Gateway's T-6836, if you are looking for something in between a netbook and a $1,000 model - you are covered. It carries certain downsides, but still packs enough performance and features to make the $800 retail price feel well-worth it.